Quick Answer
The oldest Sufi treatise in Persian, written in Lahore around 1070 by a man whose tomb is still the city's spiritual centre, and translated a century ago by the scholar who knew the literature best. It is a survey of the path as it stood before Rumi, before the great orders, before the poetry: what Sufism means, who the masters were, which schools disagreed about what, and the sequence of veils a seeker lifts. It is dry in places and irreplaceable throughout, because a great deal of what it preserves survives nowhere else.
Key Takeaways
- Sufism before the poets: doctrine, biography and practice, not verse.
- Twelve schools, ten sound and two rejected, mapped by their disputes.
- Eleven veils structure the second half, from purification to audition.
- The Nicholson translation is abridged and still unsurpassed.
- Lahore's saint: the man who wrote it is Data Ganj Bakhsh.
16 min read
What This Book Is
Kashf al-Mahjub, The Revelation of the Veiled, was written in Persian by Ali ibn Uthman al-Jullabi al-Hujwiri in Lahore, probably in the 1060s, in response to a request from a fellow seeker who asked him to explain the way of the Sufis, its doctrines, its masters and its practices.
It is, as far as the surviving record goes, the first full treatise on Sufism in the Persian language, and among the earliest systematic accounts of the path in any language. It stands with Qushayri's Risala, written in Arabic a generation earlier, and Sarraj's Kitab al-Luma as one of the three foundational handbooks of classical Sufism.
The English translation by Reynold Nicholson, published in 1911 in the Gibb Memorial Series and reprinted many times since, runs to around four hundred pages and is the edition reviewed here.
The book is not literature in the way the later Persian classics are. It is a treatise: careful, argumentative, learned, and concerned above all to establish what true Sufism is against its imitations.
A word on names. Hujwiri is named after Hujwir, a district of Ghazna; Jullabi after another. In Lahore and across South Asia he is known simply as Data Ganj Bakhsh or Data Sahib, and the book is often cited under his honorific. English editions use Hujwiri.
Who al-Hujwiri Was
He was born in Ghazna, in what is now Afghanistan, around the turn of the eleventh century, into a scholarly family, and trained in the Junaydi tradition of Sufism under Abu'l-Fadl al-Khuttali, a master in the line of Junayd of Baghdad.
He travelled widely. The book records visits to Syria, Iraq, Khurasan, Transoxiana, Azerbaijan and elsewhere, meetings with the Sufis of each region, and a period of captivity in an unnamed place. He was, by his own account, a seeker who went looking for the masters and sat with as many as he could find.
He settled in Lahore, then the eastern edge of the Ghaznavid domains, in the last years of his life, and died there around 1072 or 1077. He complains in the book that his own writings were lost when a borrower kept them and passed them off as his own, and that he was writing in exile among people who did not understand the path.
Lahore and the Shrine
The afterlife of the author is larger than the book and worth knowing.
Hujwiri was buried in Lahore, and within a few generations his tomb had become a shrine. It is now Data Darbar, the largest and most visited Sufi shrine in South Asia, at the centre of the old city, and the annual festival draws hundreds of thousands. The Chishti master Muinuddin, founder of the great Indian order, is said to have made a retreat at the tomb before beginning his mission, and Hujwiri is regarded as the spiritual gatekeeper of the subcontinent.
The Kashf is his only surviving work, and it is read at the shrine as scripture. A reader in the West meets it as an early treatise; in Lahore it is the founding text of a living devotion.
The Structure
The book has two movements.
The first is doctrinal and historical. It opens with a discussion of knowledge and its kinds, then of what Sufism is and where the word comes from, then of poverty and purity as the marks of the Sufi. It gives biographies of the Companions of the Prophet, the early ascetics and the great Sufi masters down to Hujwiri's own teachers. Then it surveys the twelve schools into which the Sufis of his day were divided, with the distinctive doctrine of each.
The second movement is the revelation of the veils proper: a sequence of chapters, each on a practice or a topic, presented as a veil that the seeker must have lifted. Knowledge of God, unity, faith, purification, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, companionship, technical terms, and audition. Each chapter states the outward law, the inward meaning, the disputes among the Sufis, and Hujwiri's own view.
What Sufism Means
The early chapters address the question directly, and they are among the best short answers in the literature.
Hujwiri surveys the proposed etymologies of the word Sufi, from suf, wool, from safa, purity, from the bench of the poor at the Prophet's mosque, and dismisses the search: the word is too exalted to have a derivation, he says, and the Sufi is one whose purity is complete. He then distinguishes the Sufi, who has arrived, from the mutasawwif, who is on the way, and from the mustaswif, who imitates the outward for the sake of reputation.
He collects definitions from the masters, dozens of them, on the principle that Sufism is a state rather than a doctrine and can only be pointed at. The collection is one of the earliest and Nicholson's rendering of it is frequently quoted.
The Biographies
A large part of the first movement, and the part most valuable to historians.
Hujwiri gives short lives and characteristic sayings of the four rightly guided caliphs, the members of the Prophet's household, the early ascetics of Basra and Kufa, and then the great names of formative Sufism: Hasan of Basra, Ibrahim ibn Adham, Rabia, Dhu'l-Nun, Bayazid Bistami, Junayd, Hallaj, Shibli and many more, ending with the masters of his own generation.
The biographies are brief and edifying rather than critical, but they preserve sayings and anecdotes that survive nowhere else, and they show how the tradition understood its own lineage two centuries after its beginnings. His treatment of Hallaj, executed for blasphemy in 922, is careful: he defends the man's sincerity while regretting his indiscretion, which was the position of the sober school he belonged to.
The Twelve Schools
The section that makes the book unique.
Hujwiri classifies the Sufis of his day into twelve schools, each named for a master and marked by a characteristic doctrine. The Muhasibis, followers of al-Muhasibi, held that satisfaction with God is a state and not a station. The Qassaris, of Hamdun al-Qassar, taught the way of blame, deliberately courting disapproval to kill the ego. The Tayfuris, of Bayazid, favoured intoxication and rapture. The Junaydis, his own school, favoured sobriety. The Nuris held that companionship is superior to solitude. The Sahlis, of Sahl al-Tustari, emphasised the struggle against the lower soul. The Hakimis, of al-Tirmidhi, developed the doctrine of sainthood. The Kharrazis taught annihilation and subsistence. The Khafifis, absence and presence. The Sayyaris, union and separation.
Two further schools he rejects: the Hululis, who held that God indwells in human beings, and a party of the Hallajis whom he regards as having taken Hallaj's words in a heretical sense.
No other source gives this map. Whether the schools were as distinct as Hujwiri makes them is debated; what is certain is that the doctrines he assigns to each were live questions, and that the book records the arguments at the moment they were being had.
The Disputes That Mattered
Worth drawing out, because they shaped everything after.
Sobriety against intoxication: whether the goal is a rapture that overwhelms the self or a clarity that survives the return. Hujwiri, a Junaydi, argues for sobriety and treats intoxication as a stage.
Companionship against solitude: whether the seeker advances better among others or alone. He sides with companionship, and the chapter on it is one of the longest.
Annihilation and subsistence: whether the self is destroyed in God or transformed and returned. He holds that the annihilation is of attributes, not of the person, and that subsistence in God is the higher state.
Whether saints can be aware of their sainthood, whether miracles prove anything, whether audition is lawful: each is set out with the positions of the schools and adjudicated. The book is where a reader sees the tradition arguing with itself, and it is more alive for it.
The Veils
The second movement, and the book's title.
Hujwiri presents the practices of Islam and of Sufism as a sequence of veils. Each is a barrier between the seeker and God, and each is lifted by the practice associated with it, understood outwardly and in its spiritual meaning together. The first veil is the knowledge of God. Then unity, then faith, then purification, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage, the pillars of the law read as stages of the path. Then companionship, then the technical vocabulary of the Sufis, then audition.
For each, he gives the legal requirement, the Sufi interpretation, the disputes, and the stories. The chapter on prayer, for instance, treats the ritual ablution as the purification of the heart, the facing of Mecca as the turning of the whole being, and the prostration as annihilation, and it does so without dismissing the outward form. Hujwiri's Sufism keeps the law intact and finds the path inside it.
Poverty and Purity
The two words Hujwiri uses to define the Sufi, and the subject of the opening chapters.
Poverty, faqr, is the condition of having nothing and needing nothing but God, and Hujwiri treats it as both an outward state, the renunciation of possessions, and an inward one, the emptying of the heart. He records the dispute over whether poverty or wealth is superior, sides with poverty, and then complicates it: true poverty is the absence of attachment rather than the absence of things, and a rich man may have it while a beggar does not.
Purity, safa, is the state that poverty makes possible, and he describes it as the polishing of the heart until it reflects. The two chapters together are a compact statement of the ascetic foundation of the path before the later tradition softened it.
Companionship and Conduct
The chapter that most shows the book as a document of a community.
Hujwiri sets out the rules of companionship among Sufis: how to treat a master, how to treat fellow travellers, the duties of hospitality, the conduct of a Sufi on the road, in a hospice, at a meal, in dress. The detail is considerable. There are rules for the patched frock, its meaning and when it may be worn; for the seeker's residence and travel; for eating, sleeping and speech.
These are the customs of the early Sufi lodges before the great orders formalised them, and the chapter is one of the main sources for how those communities lived. It also shows Hujwiri's practical temper: the path was a way of life among people, and the rules of living together were part of the discipline.
One passage on the patched frock captures the whole book's method. Hujwiri explains that the khirqa, the ragged garment of the Sufi, is lawful to wear only for one whose inward state matches it, and that to wear it for reputation is worse than to wear silk. He then records the masters who wore it and those who refused it, and the reasons on each side, and concludes that the garment is nothing and the state is everything, while still describing exactly how the garment should be sewn. The outward is never dismissed and never mistaken for the inward. That balance is the sober school's signature and the book's.
The Chapter on Audition
The last veil, and the most argued chapter in early Sufi literature.
Sama, audition, is the practice of listening to music, poetry and recitation as a means of spiritual arousal, and it was controversial from the beginning, since the law's position on music was disputed and the practice could plainly be abused. Hujwiri treats it at length and with care.
He surveys the legal positions, records the practice of the masters, and lays down conditions: sama is lawful for one whose heart is sound and whose arousal is for God, unlawful for the novice and the sensual, to be conducted without a crowd, without the young, and without display. He describes its effects, the ecstasy and the movement, and distinguishes real rapture from performance.
The chapter is the foundation of everything later written on the subject and the reason the later orders could defend their music. Readers who know only the whirling of the Mevlevis will find its justification worked out here two centuries before Rumi.
The Sober School
The position the whole book takes, stated plainly.
Hujwiri belonged to the tradition of Junayd, which held that the goal of the path is the sobriety that follows the intoxication of union: the return of the self, transformed, to the world and the law. He regards ecstasy as real and as a stage, distrusts those who make it the end, and reads the extravagant sayings of Bayazid and Hallaj as utterances of a state rather than statements of doctrine.
This is why the book keeps the law so firmly, why it argues for companionship over solitude, and why it is a treatise rather than a rhapsody. The sober school produced the handbooks; the intoxicated school produced the poems. A reader who has met Sufism through the poems will find this the other half.
Beside Qushayri
The comparison every scholar makes.
Al-Qushayri's Risala, written in Nishapur in 1045, covers the same ground, biographies, terms, stations and states, in Arabic and for a learned audience. It is more systematic, more restrained, and became the standard textbook of the tradition.
Hujwiri knew it and drew on it. His own book is in Persian, for a wider readership; it is more personal, recording his own travels and opinions; and it is more interested in the schools and their disputes. Where Qushayri gives the consensus, Hujwiri gives the arguments. Readers wanting the tradition's settled teaching should take Qushayri; readers wanting to watch it settle should take Hujwiri.
Nicholson's Translation
Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, 1868 to 1945, was the Cambridge orientalist who edited and translated Rumi's Masnavi, wrote the first serious English studies of Sufism, and shaped how the English-speaking world met the tradition. His Kashf al-Mahjub of 1911 was among his early works and remains the standard.
The translation is abridged: he condensed passages he judged repetitive and omitted a few, marking the omissions. His English is clear and slightly formal, and his notes identify the persons and terms. A complete modern translation exists in Pakistan but has not displaced his.
For a reader without Persian, Nicholson is the book, and his introduction is the best short account of Hujwiri's life and text in English.
What It Preserves
The reason the book matters beyond its own arguments.
It records sayings of the early masters found nowhere else. It gives the only contemporary map of the Sufi schools of the eleventh century. It documents the customs of the early lodges before the orders codified them. It marks the moment Sufism crossed into the Persian language and the Indian subcontinent, where it would flourish for a thousand years. And it preserves the voice of a specific man, travelling, arguing, exiled, writing at the edge of the Islamic world for readers he doubted would understand.
Historians of Sufism cite it on nearly every page of the formative period. That is the measure of what it holds.
The Difficulties
Three, and they are the text's.
It is dry. A treatise, argued and catalogued, without the poetry a modern reader expects from Sufism. The stories are brief and the definitions many.
The translation is abridged and old. Nicholson's cuts are marked but real, and his English is a century old.
The schools may be tidier than the history. Hujwiri's twelve are a classification, and scholars doubt the divisions were as sharp on the ground as on the page.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want Sufism as its own early masters described it, before the poets made it beautiful.
Read it if you are interested in how a mystical tradition argues with itself, since the twelve schools are the clearest record of that anywhere in Islam.
Read it if you have visited Data Darbar, or intend to, and want to know what the saint under the dome actually wrote.
Read it after al-Ghazali's Deliverance, which tells you why one man chose the path; this tells you what the path was when he chose it.
The book's lasting lesson is in its shape. Hujwiri set out to reveal what was veiled and did it by describing the veils, one by one, and the practice that lifts each. He did not promise the vision; he described the discipline. That is the sober school's whole teaching in a method: the revelation is something that happens as the coverings are removed, never something you are told about, and the coverings are removed by ordinary practices done with extraordinary attention. The book is a list of coverings. What is behind them, he says, you will see for yourself.
The oldest Persian treatise on Sufism, from the saint of Lahore, in the Nicholson translation.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the dryness of the text and the age of the translation are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Kashf al-Mahjub?
The Revelation of the Veiled, an eleventh-century treatise by Ali ibn Uthman al-Hujwiri setting out the doctrines, practices and history of Sufism. It is the oldest surviving Sufi treatise in Persian and one of the earliest systematic accounts of the path in any language.
Who was al-Hujwiri?
A Sufi of the Junaydi school from Ghazna in Afghanistan, who travelled across the Islamic world before settling in Lahore, where he died around 1072. He is venerated there as Data Ganj Bakhsh, the Giver of Treasure, and his shrine is the most visited in Pakistan.
What does it contain?
An account of the meaning of Sufism, biographies of the early masters, a survey of twelve Sufi schools and their doctrines, and a long treatment of the veils, the practices and states that make up the path: purification, prayer, poverty, companionship, audition and the rest.
What are the twelve schools?
Hujwiri's classification of the Sufi movements of his day by their founders and characteristic doctrines: the Muhasibis, Qassaris, Tayfuris, Junaydis, Nuris, Sahlis, Hakimis, Kharrazis, Khafifis and Sayyaris, whom he approves, and two he rejects as heretical.
Why is it called the Revelation of the Veiled?
Because its subject is the veils that stand between the seeker and God and the lifting of those veils that Sufi practice brings. The second half of the book is organised as a sequence of veils to be lifted.
What does it say about sama?
The chapter on audition, listening to music and poetry as a spiritual practice, is among the most careful in early Sufi literature. Hujwiri permits it under strict conditions and describes both its dangers and its power.
Who translated it?
Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, the great Cambridge scholar of Sufism, in 1911 for the Gibb Memorial Series. His abridged translation remains the standard English version and is the edition reviewed here.
Is the translation complete?
No. Nicholson condensed some passages and omitted a few, indicating where. A complete translation has not superseded his, and his notes remain the best guide to the text.
How does it relate to Qushayri's Risala?
The two are near-contemporary and cover similar ground. Qushayri wrote in Arabic for a scholarly audience and is more systematic. Hujwiri wrote in Persian, is more personal and more concerned with the schools and their disputes.
Is it a practical manual?
Partly. It describes the practices in detail and offers guidance on companionship, travel, dress and conduct, but its purpose is to explain and defend the path rather than to serve as a step-by-step guide.
Why does it matter for Sufi history?
It preserves biographies, sayings and doctrinal positions from the formative centuries that survive nowhere else, and it records the moment when Sufism moved into the Persian-speaking east and the Indian subcontinent.
Who should read it?
Readers of Sufism who want an early primary source rather than a modern summary, students of Islamic history, and anyone who has visited Data Darbar in Lahore and wondered what the man buried there wrote.
Name the veil
Hujwiri's method can be borrowed without his religion. Take the practice you already do, whatever it is, and ask what it is a veil for: what stands between you and the thing the practice is supposed to reach, and whether the practice as you do it actually touches that covering or only rehearses its outward form. He asked that of prayer, fasting and the patched frock, and found in each case that the form was easy and the veil was elsewhere. The question is portable. Most people never ask it of the things they do every day.
Sources & References
- Al-Hujwiri, Ali ibn Uthman. The Kashf al-Mahjub: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, Gibb Memorial Series.
- Al-Qushayri. Al-Qushayri's Epistle on Sufism, trans. Alexander Knysh.
- Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam.
- Knysh, Alexander. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History.
- Karamustafa, Ahmet. Sufism: The Formative Period.
- Nicholson, R.A. The Mystics of Islam.